Slickspaces Blog

Hi, I’m Michael and I would just like to walk you through a couple of thermostats that we’ve tried actually four thermostats that we’ve tried. I love cool gadgets so the first one I’ve got was the Nest. The Nest is a beautiful piece of industrial design but in terms of a practical piece of industrial design, it wasn’t so great. When we had it in here (in our office) it’s kind of a turn device and it sticks onto the wall. I would often find it on the ground because my 65-year-old mother in law was trying to turn it but at the same time wasn’t quite sure how it was working, it kind of works like a Blackberry the old school Blackberry, and so she was often pulling it off the wall. When I took it home, my kids were constantly turning it because it’s really fun to turn and so the Nest as a learning thermostat was learning that behavior, which is obviously not something you want to have in a thermostat, you don’t want to be learning those behaviors. So learning thermostats are good, but if you’re teaching it the wrong things like my four-year-old was, not so great. We then went to the ecobee which is a Canadian product. Very very nice Wifi, smart thermostat. .We keep it on here at the office but it’s really a premium thermostat and most thermostats are ‘set and forget’ type of things, so we don’t include it in our Kickstarter, we don’t include it in what we are giving to people, because like I said most things are ‘set and forget’ so we can support it, but if you have it and you really love it, because it does look beautiful, then that’s what we would help you support. What we do supply usually and because they’re simple and they’re Z-wave and they work really well, they are very cost effective is the radio thermostat, this one works for most HVAC systems, Heating Ventilation Air Conditioner systems, and it has multiple wires that can go into it if you have a fan, a heating coil and a cooling foil and all those other kinds of things. And for the very simple things, like if you just had an electric baseboard heater, you don’t need a $300 thermostat for an electric baseboard heater we have the style pro which is a pretty common two wire electric baseboard heater type of thermostat. That’s the reason why we use these two because they’re a lot simpler, but we can support the others as well. We don’t usually supply them to people because they are cost prohibitive. Thanks for watching our review!

I’d like to walk you through the Sesame Lock which is a pretty cool lock it’s very similar to the August Lock in a lot of ways in that it’s very ‘do it yourself’ where you can install it straight onto your door. The Sesame which is really neat and very easy is that it’s double sided tape so in this case, I put it right on the Mortis Lock which you can’t usually do with the August. The August would require you to put it into a deadbolt like I have for the Yale here, but the Sesame is quite easy to install because it’s just double sided tape, maybe not the most you know long term solution but it works. So I threw it on and to set it the app it’s quite easy basically it’s just a little motor that’s turning the deadbolt. The app is fairly simple to use. You can see here it’s just waiting for it to connect, it’s authenticating and then this is it locking. So the one thing you can hear is that the motor is not super strong. Now you see it’s really struggling to close it and this door is actually not perfectly aligned so when it wants to go unlock the door and honestly, most locks will have this problem. If it’s not perfectly aligned it won’t lock all the way because it’s just not going all the way into the ‘pinhole’ is what I’ll call it. So overall it’s not a bad lock it doesn’t have the same problems as the August (lock) in that it’s a really big thing to turn, it’s a little bit nicer to turn it’s a little bit more similar to this (the Yale lock). Overall it’s a decent-ish lock I wouldn’t, I mean it’s plastic that’s the other thing; this is not a long-term solution lock. It’s really a fun toy that I like to play with. But that’s my review of the Sesame Lock.